The Kims: Good Help Is Hard to Find

At times this space has urged President Kim to be more exacting in staffing his administration. Too often Jim Wright’s tired holdovers have been good enough for our new leader.

This is decidedly not the case as regards President Kim’s personal staff. It seems that Jim Kim and his spouse, Dr. Younsook Lim, are now in the process of hiring yet another new House Manager for the President’s residence on Webster Avenue — the first three managers just did not make the grade during the Kim family’s initial year in Hanover.

Drs. Kim and Lim are to be commended for insisting on nothing but the best support for their endeavors. There is quite a difference between mediocrity and high quality in one’s employees. Maybe we can hope that eventually President Kim will become similarly exigent in choosing senior administrators for the College.

All that said, stories about President Kim’s revolving door House Manager position are making the round of the faculty. It seems that President Kim and Dr. Lim are difficult employers in a domestic setting. Talk of summary dismissals is rife, and no conversation goes by without reference to Kim’s exponentially increasing reputation for arrogance.

Note: There is no doubt now that President Kim has a serious problem with the faculty. He needs to get out to the departments, meet the College’s professors, and listen to their concerns about his administration and the direction of the College. Angry talk of the type mentioned above festers when there are underlying grievances.

October 18, 2009When Love Beckoned in 52nd Street
We were at San Francisco’s BIX last evening, enjoying prosecco, cheese, and a bit of music. A full year of inhabitation in Northern California has unraveled to me no decent venue for proper lounging, but…

October 9, 2009D Afraid of a Little Competish
So our colleague and Dartblog writer Joe Asch informed me that the D has rejected our cunning advertising campaign. Uh-oh. The Dartmouth is widely known as a breeding ground for instant New York Times successes,…

September 4, 2009How Regents Should Reign
As Dartmouth alumni proceed through the legal hoops necessary to defuse a Board-packing plan—which put in unhappy desuetude an historic 1891 Agreement between alumni and the College guaranteeing a half-democratically-elected Board of Trustees—it strikes one…

August 29, 2009Election Reform Study Committee
If you are an alum of the College on the Hill, you may have received a number of e-mails of late beseeching your input for a new arm of the College’s Alumni Control Apparatus called…